Some outliners and the features Unicode, search in the tree, website publishing

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 27, 2013 at 10:03 AM

Perhaps you should take a look at OneNote, too?

As a translator and terminologist myself, I increasingly use OneNote to manage text. Not just because OneNote has a reasonably powerful (albeit fairly irritating) search engine (although the iOS version is actually rather good), but also because:

a) OneNote supports Word files effortlessly - in particular, I can copy and paste source text from one Word file on one side of the page, and target text from my translation (again, in Word) on the other side of the page, then tweak the text boxes until they are more or less aligned. Of course OneNote also supports many other file formats.

b) OneNote has a powerful multilingual OCR function, so if you’re translating from hardcopy (rare nowadays, I know) or a graphics-only PDF, it’s not a problem. You can further enhance the OCR by installing the sensational Onetastic extension.

c) OneNote can output pages as PDF files - effortlessly. This means you can use Adobe Reader’s very powerful multi-file search function to search through collections of PDFs of aligned texts. Increasingly, I create bitexts in PDF format (using OneNote or other methods, including various alignment tools) and then store them in appropriate subfolders so I can either search through a group of top-level folders or just one subfolder. I maintain such collections for a variety of clients, especially clients who tend to send me texts in different formats - you can produce PDFs of just about anything.

Sidenote: If OneNote can’t handle a particular PDF, I use an open-source utility (PDF Split and Merge) to interleave PDF pages (e.g. one page of German, followed by the equivalent page of English). I use PDF Xchange Viewer to set up the PDF files so both pages are shown automatically when the file is opened (Two-Page Scrolling View). Sorry, it’s a bit difficult to explain, but I’d be happy to discuss this in more detail for those interested.

d) OneNote is multi-platform. I sync all my OneNote files to my iPad. It’s extremely convenient! And OneNote for iOS is free. The synchronisation function is quite quick!

e) You can share OneNote notebooks over LANs and over the Internet.

f) OneNote is perfectly happy with foreign characters of all kinds - the full Unicode range and more.

Finally, OneNote is perfectly fine with Word tables. You’ll need OneNote 2010 or above, of course. The 2003 version is much less powerful, and also not compatible with the new 2013 version (2010 is). Also, 2010 happily interacts with SkyDrive.

I’ve become something of a reluctant convert to OneNote, which is staggeringly powerful! It could be even better, but makes up for many things by its sheer flexibility.